As this is my first post on here i thought i'd start with a contentious issue in our organisation. Look at the statement bellow and tell me if you agree;

"A Problem record cannot be progressed into a known error untill all associated incidents are resolved"

This appears to be supported by the blue book which states;

"A known error status is assigned when the root cause of a problem is found and a workaround has been identified"

An incident follows a different life-cycle than a problem. In essence, it is right to say that the first focus needs to be to restore the service (thus resolve the incident). However, we don't prevent our problem management team to open a Known error even though some incidents may still be opened. The key question is: has the root cause been found.

Usually, considering problem management follows a much different timeline than an incident (i.e. problem takes more time to investigate), we are able to resolve the incident before root cause is identified.

Because of the important volumes we manage, we have cleanly seperated the incident resolution from the problem investigation both in terms of process and individuals, providing touch point at incident review. This makes sense for our business needs but may not apply in your organization._________________------------------------------------------
Jean-Francois Cyr
Senior Business Advisor, Chorus Solution
CGI Group
(Note from Admin: No Advertising Link Please)

As this is my first post on here i thought i'd start with a contentious issue in our organisation. Look at the statement bellow and tell me if you agree;

"A Problem record cannot be progressed into a known error untill all associated incidents are resolved"

This appears to be supported by the blue book which states;

"A known error status is assigned when the root cause of a problem is found and a workaround has been identified"

I would have to disagree with the statement proposed by your organization. Consider the following situation:

Your organization has users that are reporting a lot of Incidnets when using an intranet web app. The issue is turned over to Problem Management who finds that the CI at fault is MS Internet Explorer, the Root Cause is the way MS has determined to support a web standard (javascript), and a workaround would be to install Mozilla on the affected workstations.

You have successfully defined the Problem to the state of a Known Error. The question of whether to execute the workaround on all the affected workstations is up to the Incident Management process. It may be that an emergency Change could be executed on the intranet web app to resolve the Problem in less than 24 hours. In that situation, executing the workaround to the list of currently affected workstations would be more effort than it is worth.